Egg industry resorts to blaming the victim in recall, critics say

Monday

Aug 30, 2010 at 8:48 AMAug 30, 2010 at 8:49 AM

By ELIZABETH WEISEUSA TODAY

No more sunny side up. No more Eggs Benedict. No more almost-set scrambled eggs. In the wake of one of the largest egg recalls on record critics say the egg industry is resorting to the worst tactic of all - blaming the victim.More than 1,400 illnesses now appear to be tied to an outbreak of salmonella enteritidis definitively linked to eggs produced on two Iowa farms. “Consumers that were sickened reportedly all ate eggs that were not properly or thoroughly cooked. Eggs need to be cooked so that the whites and yolks are firm (not runny) which should kill any bacteria,” says Mitch Head, spokesperson for the United Egg Producers.The message seems to be that anyone who eats them otherwise should be aware they’re eating the food safety equivalent of steak tartare, a dish of raw, seasoned minced beef first popularized in France.“Some people may not think of an egg as you would ground beef, but they need to start,” says Krista Eberle of the United Egg Producers’ Egg Safety Center. “It may sound harsh and I don’t mean it to sound that way. But all the responsibility cannot be placed on the farmer. Somewhere along the line consumers have to be responsible for what they put in their bodies.”Consumers who don’t cook their eggs all the way through “are taking a risk on themselves,” she says.Last week in a series of morning TV interviews, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Margaret Hamburg told consumers that they should reject over-easy eggs and avoid “runny egg yolks for mopping up with toast.”This isn’t sitting well with food safety advocates.“Telling me that basically ‘You didn’t cook it right,’ it’s just offensive,” says Nancy Donley, board president of Safe Tables Our Priority, a food safety consumer group. “The problem isn’t how consumers are preparing the food, the problem is that the food is contaminated,” she says. “They keep trying to push the responsibility onto consumers, they’re just not taking their own responsibility.”If consumers are really being held accountable as the last line of defense in the food safety farm-to-fork line, then the egg industry needs to be explicit about it, says Carol Tucker-Foreman, an assistant secretary of agriculture under President Jimmy Carter who’s worked on food policy at Consumer Federation of America for decades.“Should egg cartons be required to carry a message that says ‘Warning - to protect your health and the health of those in your household, you should assume that these eggs are contaminated with Salmonella Enteriditis and must be handled carefully in order to avoid possible illness?’ ” she asks.People who study food safety say the whole idea is wrong simply because it doesn’t get at the real danger - cross-contamination.If indeed eggs now need to be treated “like hazardous waste,” says Douglas Powell, a professor of food safety at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kan., then the issue isn’t so much the egg on the plate as the egg in the bowl, and on the counter and stove.“You know, when you’re making scrambled eggs and egg ends up on the counter?” he says. His team at K-State has spent hundreds of hours videotaping actual home cooks working in actual kitchens. What the researchers found is that when people use eggs in cooking, raw egg ends up all over the place, on hands, dish towels, utensils, the stove, everywhere. People are basically “delusional at how good they are at handling food,” he says.Which isn’t to say the message that raw eggs are potentially hazardous is new. Big restaurant chains have been aware of the danger for years. Not that they’ve stopped serving what now should be called under-cooked eggs. Nor have all the enticing photos of sunny-side up eggs disappeared from their menus. But they do warn people.At IHOP, all egg dishes that can come undercooked are marked with an asterisk. A note at the bottom of the menu says “Notice: items marked with an (ASTERICK) may be cooked to order. Consuming raw or undercooked meat or eggs may increase your risk of food borne illness.” At Denny’s the wording is “Eggs served over easy, poached sunnyside up or soft boiled may be undercooked and will only be served upon the consumers’ request.”And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has long advised consumers that “Consumption of raw or undercooked eggs should be avoided, especially by young children, elderly persons, and persons with weakened immune systems or debilitating illness.”

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